She measures two and a half inches, and she is looking straight at you.
The portrait is a tintype from about 1860, hand-colored, small enough to close inside a locket case. A young Black woman sits in lace gloves and a good dress, composed as anyone has ever sat for a camera, and someone inscribed it with the words “Remember Me, Annie.” This winter, her request is the title of an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art.
Remember Me: Picturing African Americans in Early Photography opens November 7 in the West Building’s Gallery G30 and runs through March 14, 2027. It gathers some 70 works from the Gallery’s own collection, many on view for the first time, arranged chronologically in three sections. Daguerreotypes give way to ambrotypes, tintypes, and paper prints, and across all of them runs one argument: from the medium’s first decade, Black Americans used the camera to say who they were.
The faces
The earliest pictures here date to photography’s infancy. A double portrait from 1848, by Joseph D. Marsters, shows Martha Ann “Patty” Atavis and Anna Whitridge barely a decade after the daguerreotype reached America. James Presley Ball, the Cincinnati photographer whose studio was a Black business enterprise of the first rank, appears with his Portrait of the Hercules Family, about 1850. Glenalvin Goodridge, who ran a studio in York, Pennsylvania, is here too, represented by an ambrotype of a cat, of all things, a working photographer’s playful proof of skill.
Then the war arrives. An ambrotype from about 1863 shows a young soldier in uniform, hand-colored, his cap set straight. A half century later, a group portrait from about 1918 gathers Red Cross nurses in white, small American flags in hand. Between those two pictures lies the whole arc the exhibition traces: people photographed before, during, and after emancipation, in studios and in uniform, insisting on being recorded on their own terms.
The man who gathered them
Most of these pictures reached the museum through one person’s patience. Ross J. Kelbaugh, a Maryland historian of photography, spent nearly fifty years hunting early photographs of African American life at estate sales, auctions, and flea markets, assembling some 500 photographs, documents, and objects into what he called a teaching collection. The National Gallery bought the collection in 2023, with support from the Ford Foundation.
That purchase matters beyond one museum’s walls. Pictures like these survived because families kept them in albums and because one collector understood, decades before the market did, that a tintype of an unnamed woman was a national treasure. Preservation is often described as an institution’s job. This exhibition is evidence that it begins as somebody’s devotion.
Why the sitting mattered
A portrait sitting in 1855 was neither cheap nor casual, and the caricatures of Black life circulating in print were vicious. To commission a portrait was to answer them: to choose the dress, the pose, the backdrop, the expression. The Gallery’s curators, led by Diane Waggoner with Katie Cornell and Sarah Greenough, frame the show around that choice, pictures made of Black Americans and by Black photographers, from Ball’s commercial studio to James Van Der Zee’s Harlem a lifetime later. The exhibition is supported by the Trellis Charitable Fund, with additional support from Nion McEvoy and Leslie Berriman.
Admission to the National Gallery is free, which suits this material. These were never palace objects. They were made for parlor tables and coat pockets, and they carried a simple instruction across 166 years.
Annie asked to be remembered. The museum has put her words over the door, and the line forms behind her.
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